The FReeper Foxhole Revisits The Sinking of the SS Leopoldville (Dec. 24, 1944) - Dec. 24th, 2004

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[snippy_about_it]

Lord,

Keep our Troops forever in Your care

Give them victory over the enemy...

Grant them a safe and swift return...

Bless those who mourn the lost.
.

FReepers from the Foxhole join in prayer
for all those serving their country at this time.


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The FReeper Foxhole Revisits

Nightmare Before Christmas

As we here at Skylighters do each Christmas, we take a journey of remembrance back to that final Christmas of the war in Europe. We usually tell a story about what it was like to spend that holy day on a windswept ridge above the Seigfried line, or at a frozen airstrip in eastern France, or in a POW camp on the Polish frontier. Sometimes the stories are uplifting; other times, they're tragic. Sometimes, the story contains elements of both. The point is to remember what it was like for those who won our right, all those Decembers ago, to enjoy our freedoms this December, and there is no more poignant tale for this purpose than the sinking of the Leopoldville.

This year, thanks to the kindness of an English newspaper, we relay the story of the "Nightmare Before Christmas," the sinking of the troopship SS Leopoldville in the English Channel on Christmas Eve, 1944, a tragedy that took nearly 800 American lives. It's a story that few Americans of my generation are aware of, and even some of the WW II generation may not have heard.

As a (relatively) young man myself, it's always a sobering thing to read the names of war dead, and in the case of the Leopoldville, it seems all the more horrible that all those bright young men of the 66th Infantry Division ("The Black Panthers") died on Christmas Eve just under six miles from friendly shores. That a U-boat fired a torpedo into the former Belgian liner was a known risk of warfare. As a result, many of the young infantrymen aboard never saw Christmas 1944, or, indeed, another Christmas at all. But what contributed to the deaths of so many of the 800 and what happened afterward could not have been imagined.

Who were these men? I took the trouble to look up some of their names. There's Carlton Garlan of Stockton, Alabama; James L. McNair of Calhoun Falls, South Carolina; and William A. Klosterman of Rockville Center, New York. And Pablo G. Franco of Loving, New Mexico and John Marzotto of Weehawken, New Jersey. Scranton, Pennsylvnia gave Walter J. Skibinski and Chicago, Illinois sacrificed Albert Verbauen. I whisper the names in the dark room as I type this. For those moments that the letters materialize on the page in pronounceable patterns, I feel somehow this long-dead men are remembered. Like the scene in Saving Private Ryan where Ryan asks what the names were of the men who died looking for him, the mere intonation of each name (Caparzo, Wade) has resonance, meaning. Like Ryan, who repeats the names to himself, saying the names of the dead aloud is a way of remembering them.

With each name uttered I'm transported back to that black Christmas Eve 58 years ago. The lights twinkling in the windows across the street may have been how the harbor lights of Cherbourg may have looked through the mist that night in 1944. I see wreaths floating on the dark water — not Christmas wreaths, but funeral wreaths. Black circular holes in the water through which these young men disappeared as if down a coal chute into those cold English depths, the surface chopped by the hand of fate that night to the whipped green-white color of frozen spinach. It must have been much like the cold water of Long Island's Great South Bay that lays before me today as I contemplate the events of December 24, 1944. Somehow the common ocean connects this spot to that, across that other ocean, time. And that place is no hallowed "altar of victory" on which those boys were symbolically sacrificed. That night the sea was an unforgiving slab concealing a murderous vortex that stupidly robbed those GIs of their futures in pure "here one minute, gone the next" finality. And today it is in no uncertain terms a silent graveyard 180 feet below the Channel. A gash in the ocean through which the 66th passed to join the drowned and dead of the 1st, and the 4th, and the 29th, and others of dozens of units who had made the same crossing on a much warmer day in June, all without completing it. It's just that there are no white crosses or stars for these 800. Just darkness and murk.



So, on this Christmas Eve 2002, I will think about the last days of those 800 GIs, many of them teenagers, sons who would never have sons or daughters of their own. Perhaps there was a cure for cancer among them. Or a peace plan for a future conflict. Or a small instance of tenderness when it was needed, or the right words at the right time to a single person. I will think about their last vision of Christmas, spent perhaps in a chilly English drill hall with makeshift trees strung with garlands of silver gum wrappers, "ornaments" of balled-up cigarette packs, and crowning stars fashioned from flattened tin cans. And when the last order came, to " gear up and move out," perhaps they were really scared for the first time. They were heading to France, and into combat to reinforce the units being bloodied in the Battle of the Bulge.

Only they never made it. They died before they had the chance to die another day.

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FReeper Foxhole Armed Services Links

[Professional Engineer]

I can imagine. It was about 81 or 82, when I started getting REALLY interested in WW2, and the surrounding events. It all seemed so far back in time to a teenager.

[SAMWolf]

Morning Aeronaut.

[SAMWolf]

LOL! Like the last one and the first one is almost too close to the truth.

[SAMWolf]

Morning E.G.C.

Foggy and cold here this morning.

[SAMWolf]

Morning GailA.

I'm guessing houses in Memphis aren't built with cold weather in mind.

[SAMWolf]

Good Morning, Samwise. Starting a snowball fight?

[SAMWolf]

While back we had 120 days when the outside temp. never got above zero.

I remember those days and don't miss them at all

[Professional Engineer]

I guess he played "While my bango gently weeps"?

[SAMWolf]

I think you're correct. The Brits used E-Boat.

[SAMWolf]

Morning Feather.

[SAMWolf]

Morning PE.

A good Poster to remind folks, Don't mess with the US

[SAMWolf]

Thanks for sharing this news story with us, brityank.

You have to admire Allan Andrade's determination.

[U S Army EOD]

Well, I kind of grew up with it. I was a dependent in Germany and France in 1949 til 1951. My father and most of my uncles were in it. In 1949 you could still see all the damage all over Europe. My father took us to Bastone and where the 6th Armored Division fought so hard. We went into one town in Belgium and the locals recognized him. The whole town just turned out and our money was no good. After having a meal we went to get our car and it was gone. We looked down the street and about ten or more people were washing it for us. Somewhere I have a photograpth of me at about 6 years old sitting in "COL" Abrams lap at that time.

[SAMWolf]

1942 1st powered flight of V-1 buzz bomb, Peenemünde, Germany

A Spitfire pilot in pursuit of a V-1 Doodlebug flying bomb low over the southern English countryside.

[SAMWolf]

Thanks Jen, Merry Christmas to you and yours.

[E.G.C.]

Good morning and merry Christmas to everyone at the Foxhole from Southwest Oklahoma.

I was looking through this morning edition of the Daily Oklahoman and came across some idiot who wrote in his letter that "this is a nation of laws, not a nation of man or g-ds". As though the laws of goverment are superior to the laws of christianity.

Well, I know for a fact that nations, commmunities and the like run by people with this kind of mindet wound up becoming third world ruins as a result.

This is whether anyone wants to believe it or not a christian nation and there is no separation of church and state just because someone says there is. This fella ovviously has no idea whatsoever of how this nation came into being.

People of this kind should be defeated, not gottne along with.

It's been cold this morning. Been having a little bit of trouble getting our car started. Supposed to warm up next week into the 50's.

How's it going, Snippy?

[SAMWolf]

Merry Christmas,tomkow6.

How's the Chicago area doing weather wise? I hear Indiana has been hit pretty bad.

[SAMWolf]

Morning Mayor.

[SAMWolf]

Oh the horror, on a gubmint owned radio no less.

Where's the ACLU when you need it? < /sarcasm>

[SAMWolf]

An incident lost in the final days of the war and of course buried by the Soviets.